First Eurodance hit in the U.S. / SUN 11-30-25 / Gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, for one / Noodling in a jazz tune / Anti-mob law acronym / John who painted 'Backyards, Greenwich Village" / Mantou or bao, in Chinese cuisine / Noodling in a jazz tune / Diamonds can sometimes be found in them / 2022 sequel to "Knives Out" / Former Portuguese colony on the Malabar Coast / Historical Dutch settler / Ancient drinker of the fermented beverage chicha / 1999 Ron Howard film about a reality show

Constructor: Natan Last

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Hog Wild" — the grid illustrates the biblical idiom PEARLS BEFORE / SWINE (16D: With 87-Down, idiom about wasting one's efforts ... as seen in four columns in this puzzle?); words that can follow "pearl" in familiar phrases / names appear inside little pearl-shaped figures (i.e. circles), and each string of "pearls" is directly above ("before") a famous pig (or "swine"):

Theme answers ("pearls" are in BLUE, "swine" are in PINK):

• "PUMP UP THE JAM" / PORKY (12D: First Eurodance hit in the U.S. (1989) / 83D: "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" speaker)
• GLASS ONION / HAMM (28D: 2022 sequel to "Knives Out" / 91D: Pink character in the "Toy Story" movies)
• PASS THE BUCK / WILBUR (6D: Skirt responsibility / 77D: Literary runt of the litter)
• SAFE HARBOR / BABE (31D: Refuge / 94D: Farmer Hoggett's entrant in a sheepherding contest)

Word of the Day: Paramore (84A: Grammy-winning Paramore hit of 2014 = "AIN'T IT FUN") —

Paramore is an American rock band formed in Franklin, Tennessee, in 2004. Since 2017, the band's lineup includes lead vocalist Hayley Williams, lead guitarist Taylor York, and drummer Zac Farro. Williams and Farro are founding members of the group, while York, a high school friend of the original lineup, joined in 2007. [...] The band's second album, Riot! (2007) became a mainstream success thanks to the success of the singles "Misery Business", "Crushcrushcrush", and "That's What You Get". The album was certified Platinum in the US and the band received a Best New Artist nomination at the 2008 Grammy Awards. Their 2009 follow-up, Brand New Eyes, reached number two on the Billboard 200 and became the band's second-highest-charting album to date. It produced the top-forty single "The Only Exception" and went platinum in Ireland and the UK. // Following the departure of Zac and Josh Farro in 2010, the band released their self-titled fourth album in 2013. Paramore gave the band their first number one album on the US Billboard 200 and was also the number one album in the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico. It included the singles "Still Into You" and "Ain't It Fun", with the latter winning the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song for Williams and York as songwriters, making it Paramore's first Grammy win.

• • •

First things first. Today's constructor, Natan Last, has a brand new book out about—you guessed it—the mating habits of the white-breasted cormorant. JK, it's about the history of the crossword puzzle! It's called Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. I've read it and I love it and you should buy it. But don't just take my word for it ... actually, you should just take my word for it, but if somehow that's not enough, read a review. Like this one in the L.A. Times. It really is a wonderful tour through this world, our world, CrossWorld. Lots of familiar names, lots of charming anecdotes. Nice timing on this puzzle, Natan. Promotional synergy! Sell those books! (if I sound cynical, I'm not—it really is a good book that deserves to be read). Now on to the puzzle!

***

Well this is certainly the most conceptually interesting Sunday puzzle I've seen in a while. The only criticism I have of the theme is that these "pearls" are more "above" than they are "before" swine. Decidedly above. If you had to describe the spatial relationship here, it's over/under, not before/after. But if you call the lawyers in, I think they could get a judge to rule that "above" is a type of "before," especially since it's reasonably conventional to think of a puzzle "starting" at the top and "ending" at the bottom. You're likely to the get the "pearl" answers "before" you get the "swine" answer, so ... OK. Judges say "OK." Beyond that, the theme is beautifully executed, particularly the "pearl" part, with the conventional circled squares magically transformed into images of pearls by virtue of the theme, and with each pearl-strand spelling out a word that can follow the word / name "Pearl": the band Pearl Jam, the cocktail garnish pearl onion, the author Pearl (S.) Buck, and the poorly-reviewed 2001 blockbuster Pearl Harbor ("a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours" — Roger Ebert). The fictional "swine" are all famous, except maybe HAMM, whose name I didn't know. Not sure he's reached the iconic status of pigs like WILBUR, BABE, and PORKY. Poor Piglet, left on the bench. But symmetry is a harsh mistress, and today she called for a four-letter pig (to match BABE). And so in goes HAMM. Toy Story is famous enough for theme answer purposes, and even if I didn't know HAMM, at least I could infer his name, so ... fair. Nice job. And kudos for working "THAT'LL DO" into the grid. I got a big post-solve rush of happiness when I realized that the puzzle was winking at me there.

The puzzle stands out physically as well, as it has an absolutely bonkers grid layout. Is it supposed to resemble a pig's face? Again, I think if you call the lawyers in, they could argue at least semi-convincingly that I'm supposed to see a pig's face. That highly unusual middle section, with its colonnade of 11s drilling 7 rows down into a black void from which there is no escape, has something vaguely snouty about it. And the upside-down black "L"s at the top are kind of ear-y. I could be convinced, is all I'm saying. 

I didn't always love the fill. AN APPLE A DAY is creative, but a bit sad on its own. Partial adages, are we doing that now? Also, AN APPLE A DAY keeps the doctor away, which seems like a far more MODEST claim than "cure-all." Apples are good for you, they are part of a healthy diet, but they don't, as yet, make you immortal. How have I been a baseball fan for nigh on a half century and never heard the term LOUD OUTS (4D: Baseballs that are hard-hit but then caught, in lingo)? It's possible (probable?) that I have heard it and just didn't process what I was hearing, or that I have not heard it nearly enough for it to register as a familiar baseball phrase. I could've inferred the meaning from the phrase itself, but I needed a bunch of crosses to get it in there today. 

There are two long song titles that are likely to throw older solvers (or, in the case of "PUMP UP THE JAM," possibly younger solvers as well)—one of them threw me. I am very much in the demo for "PUMP UP THE JAM" and very much not in the demo for Paramore, a band whose name I hear way more often than I ever hear their music. If a band blew up between the year I finished my dissertation (1999) and the first Obama administration, there is a good chance I missed the boat entirely. Job / marriage / daughter / dogs / crossword blog / etc. had me far far less focused on pop culture than I had been in my teens and 20s. The '00s is also my biggest blind spot movie-wise. Paramore becomes popular at the tail end of this pop culture blackout period for me, but despite paying reasonably close attention to contemporary music in the intervening years, I still know only their name, not a one of their songs. But they are absolutely massive for a certain section of Millennials in particular, so they're certainly crossworthy. Still, it's weird that one of their song titles made it into the grid before they did. PARAMORE seems like it would be pretty useful as 8-letter answers go—so many common letters. And yet, to date, nothing. Except "AIN'T IT FUN." It did win a Grammy. But it's decidedly less famous than most songs you're apt to see in a puzzle.

If there are rough patches in the grid here and there, I think most of them are probably side effects of a structurally demanding grid. EDTV LORI "PUMP UP THE JAM" BACON (!) HANS is quite a name wad to choke down, esp. since it's conceivable that a solver wouldn't know any of the first three of those names. No one calls stadiums STADIA, so cluing it as if it were part of ordinary baseball usage feels ridiculous (20D: Diamonds can sometimes be found in them). Staying over there for a second (with our crossword friends ARAL and SIA), what is a John SLOAN!? (26D: John who painted 'Backyards, Greenwich Village"). Besides an answer designed to make me feel like an uncultured BOER (I mean "boor" ... possibly "bore")? Aha, the Ashcan school, yes [nods sagely] I've heard of that (I have heard of it, but like many things I've heard of—say, Paramore—know almost nothing about it). Here's the painting in question:

Kitty! John SLOAN is now my favorite p— holy crap is that Ronald McDonald's evil niece in the window? This painting is just full of surprises. Oh wait, there's a second kitty! And clown girl is eying him hungrily. Run kitties, run!

Bullets:

• 81A: Lethargy (SOPOR) — pfffffffft OK I associate SOPOR (when I'm forced to think about it at all, which is only when I'm solving crosswords) with "sleep." If something's "SOPORific," it is sleep-inducing. Every definition of SOPOR I'm seeing has the word "sleep" in it. "Lethargy," on the other hand, I associate with SOPOR's cousin, TORPOR, which literally means "lethargy." 

• 21A: Actress Zosia ___ of "Girls" (MAMET) — briefly but strongly wanted this answer to be RONAN. But that's not Zosia. That Saoirse. Zosia is a different actress entirely. Daughter of the playwright MAMET.
• 52A: College voter? (ELECTOR) — as in "the Electoral College."
• 74A: Mantou or bao, in Chinese cuisine (BUN) — "bao" is very familiar to me. "Mantou," that's new. Steamed BUN, no filling, popular in northern China.

• 100A: Noodling in a jazz tune (VAMPING) — not sure why "noodling" seems far too informal a substitute for VAMPING, but it does. Yes—here we go. From good ol' M-W herself (yeah, the dictionary's a "she," no, I will not be accepting questions): ": to improvise on an instrument in an informal or desultory manner." It's the "in an informal or desultory manner" part that makes it inapt to my ear.
• 28D: 2022 sequel to "Knives Out" (GLASS ONION) — going to see the sequel to this sequel today, up in Ithaca. Very excited. I could wait two weeks for it to come out on Netflix, but screw that. Big screen, baby!

• 54D: Anti-mob law acronym (RICO) — LOL I always thought it was named for some guy named RICO. But no, the RICO of "RICO Act" stands for "Racketeer Influenced (?) and Corrupt Organizations." Is "Racketeer Influenced" a compound adjective? If so, shouldn't it be hyphenated? So awkward, no wonder they just say "RICO."
• 78D: L'___ du Nord" (Minnesota motto) (ÉTOILE) — started rereading Simenon's first Maigret mystery, Pietr-le-Letton (Pietr the Latvian) yesterday (en français), and the whole first part of the story involves tracking the movement of a trans-European train called ... L'ÉTOILE-du-Nord!

OK, that's all. Now go buy Natan's book, or order it as a holiday gift for the aspiring cruciverbalist in your life. It's very good, and not just 'cause I'm (very briefly) in it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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What sfouf is, in Lebanese cuisine / SAT 11-29-25 / Axolotl lookalikes / Nickelodeon series whose episode titles all start with the same letter as the show itself / One of 32 in the country of Kiribati / Musical production that might include grunts, groans, thwops, snorts and barks / The number 4 and the gift of a clock, in Chinese culture / Biblical figure said to have fathered Kenan at age 90

Constructor: Adrian Johnson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Goblin sharks (23D: Prominent features of goblin sharks = NOSES) —

The goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni) is a rare species of deep-sea shark. Sometimes called a "living fossil", it is the only extant representative of the family Mitsukurinidae, a lineage some 125 million years old. This pink-skinned animal has a distinctive profile with an elongated, flat snout, and highly protrusible jaws containing prominent nail-like teeth. It typically reaches a length of 3 to 4 meters (10 to 13 feet) when fully grown, although it can grow significantly larger—such as one specimen captured in 2000, which was believed to measure around 6 meters (20 feet). Goblin sharks are benthopelagic creatures that inhabit upper continental slopes, submarine canyons, and seamounts throughout the world at depths greater than 100 m (330 ft), with adults found deeper than juveniles. Some researchers believed that these sharks could also dive to depths of up to 1,300 m (4,270 ft), for short periods; footage captured in 2024 suggests that their range could be deeper than previously thought, with a confirmed sighting of an adult swimming at 2,000 m (6,560 ft).

[how is this a shark? this looks like a hand puppet prop from some Alien knockoff]

Various anatomical features of the goblin shark, such as its flabby body and small fins, suggest that it is sluggish in nature. This species hunts for teleost fishes, cephalopods, and crustaceans near the sea floor and in the middle of the water column. Its long snout is covered with ampullae of Lorenzini that sense minute electric fields produced by nearby prey, which it can snatch up by rapidly extending its jaws. Small numbers of goblin sharks are unintentionally caught by deepwater fisheries. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed it as Least Concern, despite its rarity, citing its wide distribution and low incidence of capture. (wikipedia)

• • •

It's so much easier to appreciate a puzzle's finer points when I'm not drowning in gunk. The SW corner gets a little namey there, which might cause some consternation, but otherwise this thing felt smooth as hell and polished within an inch of its life. The eastern half of this grid in particular felt beautifully built, from the TIME MACHINE at the bottom to the BAD OMENS at the top—no cringe, and only a tiny handful of answers I'd even blink at for a second—ESTEE, IDES, ROCHE, none of it apt to make me holler. When your less-than-ideal entries are a. rare and b. holding together good-to-great marquee fill, well then you're doing your job as a constructor. My experience with this puzzle fell into two distinct part—the properly hard part, where I had to work for every inch of progress (NW, SW), where the grid seemed clean and solid, but not particularly inspired; and then the much easier but also much more colorful second half (SE, NE), where the fill really started to pop. I'd put the transition moment right about ... here:

WHALE SONG and SPIDEY SENSE were like "let's go!" and off I went. Big noise ("WHAT A RACKET!"), big adventure (TIME MACHINE! Take it back (in time)!). I vaulted up from there via FAIR GAME and FADERS to the final quadrant, where I hit a little snag—briefly forgot DOLMA (24A: Dish of stuffed grape leaves) and considered DOSHA (a concept from ayurveda), and then also thought the [Know-it-all who might have a ball?] (SEER) was a SAGE, which put the "G" in exactly the right place to make 13D: The number 4 and the gift of a clock, in Chinese culture look like BAD SIGNS (as opposed to the correct BAD OMENS). But luckily I knew enough to pull DOSHA and hold off on SAGE. I must've then remembered DOLMA and then all the long Downs up there fell into place, 1, 2, 3, and that was that. Didn't even see the short Acrosses up there.

All the real difficulty today came early. Looked like I was going to start with a whoosh buuuuuuut despite the fact that I had TRAVEL and RETINA and APOLOG(Y?) all lined up, the following words weren't entirely clear to me. I must've committed to GUIDE, which seemed most likely to work in that space, and then, miracle of miracles, I was able to get a gosh darn Nickelodeon show answer on my first guess (9D: Nickelodeon series whose episode titles all start with the same letter as the show itself). "What shows star with "I"!?!? Well, there was iCARLY, but that can't ... wait, ha ha ha yes it can!" My daughter must've been the right age for her (and thus me?) to know about this show, though I don't think she watched the show herself. Stunned at my good fortune, I went forth ... and immediately fell in a mistake pit. 

Off the "Y" from iCARLY I wrote in PUNNY for 25A: Groan-worthy, say, as a joke, because of course I did, puns are groaners, so groan-worthy jokes are PUNNY, gah and bah! I mean, CORNY is not wrong, but still, bah. And working my way out of PUNNY was no cakewalk because I absolutely could not see CAKE (25D: What sfouf is, in Lebanese cuisine). I had that answer starting with a "P" from PUNNY, and yes I wrote in PITA of course I wrote in PITA. Four letters, Lebanese, starts with "P," cuisine-related, you're damned right I wrote in PITA. I think the only thing that busted me out of that horrible knot of mistakes was the goblin shark, who kept persistently nudging me with his nose, like "come on, you know it's NOSES, write in NOSES and see what happens!" I should add that I wasn''t sure GLYCERIN wasn't something like GLYCEROL (which, it turns out, is also a thing), so I was holding back that "-IN" ... oh, and I had NEIL as NEAL (23A: Drummer Peart). Annnnnyway, PUNNY out, NOSES and GLYCERIN in, then STASIS and TONGUE (eventually corrected to TONSIL) (28D: Neighbor of the uvula), and I finally got through. Still took me forever to see CAKE, though. Went through CALF and CAFE before ever hitting on CAKE.

Bullets:

• 20A: Preferred piece of commercial real estate (CORNER LOT) — my initial reaction was "who'd want to live on a CORNER LOT? Too much exposure, too much traffic" but then I belatedly noticed the word "commercial" in the clue and the answer suddenly made a lot more sense.
• 37A: 1988 Best Country Song Grammy winner for "Hold Me" (OSLIN) — as in K.T. OSLIN, '80s country's gift to crosswords. Her name's particular five-letter combination has proven ... durable.

• 44A: Musical production that might include grunts, groans, thwops, snorts and barks (WHALESONG) — a fantastic clue. I had WHALE in place and had the briefest moment of "what kind of 'musical production' starts WH-" and then I got it. Not a human musical production at all. Side note: THWOPs in the puzzle when!? If it's a real word / sound, why has it never been in the grid (in singular or plural form)? I am ready for a puzzle that groans snorts and THWOPs (although don't go too far down the THWOP rabbit hole or you'll end up at "pornographic manga" and no I'm not kidding)
• 43D: The "E" of the New York Stock Exchange's "EL" (ESTEE) — the "L" is for "Lobster." Yes, she's best known for cosmetics, but people always forget about her lobstering empire. 
• 3D: One of 32 in the country of Kiribati (ATOLL) — because ISLE wouldn't fit.
• 8D: About half of all these are made in Philadelphia, for short (U.S. COINS) — the one answer today that made me wonder "is that a real phrase?" But it is. Or various numismatic websites seem to think so anyway.
• 21D: Play list? (ROSTER) — the "list" of those who will "play" in the game.
• 27D: High-level intelligence assets? (SPY PLANES) — "High-level" because, well, they're planes. Me, a genius: "Aha, 'high-level'! I get it! It must be ... SKY PLANES!" (yes, I actually did this, no, I will not be taking any questions)
• 38D: Axolotl lookalikes (NEWTS) — I love when the clue writer thinks about how the clue sounds. Say this clue fast three times and try not to be delighted.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

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✏️ Upcoming Crossword Tournaments ✏️

• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (Stamford, CT, Apr. 10-12, 2026) (registration opens January 8!)

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📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

Read more...